Through the winter nights he sat alone in a lab, squinting into a microscope and drawing plant spores the size of a pin head. It was a part-time job for the university botany department while he went to school. in preparation he’d studied the nineteenth century Ernst Haeckel renderings of bacterium and jellyfish, somehow expecting that his own drawings would have the same precision and symmetry, evoking Victorian machine dreams as much as living organisms.  His spores resisted such assured elegance. Magnified they were featureless blurs, and a growing imperative to reveal secret structures in what he saw only goaded him to exaggeration, elaboration and out and out fantasy. Rather than Haeckel’s charm his drawings had the squish and ooze of H.P. Lovecraft decay, sprouting volcanic pustules, tangled tentacles, and gaping fibrous pods like drooling lips.  Abashed, he came to put himself in the disreputable company of the astronomer Percival Lowell, whose purportedly objective telescopic observations (and drawings) of Martian canals had destroyed his scientific reputation. Lowell wanted to see a Martian civilization so bad that there it was, for any fool to see. What did his little spores have to offer? He had hoped for something beautiful, something they had never seen before that he alone had discovered.

So far no one in the botany department had complained about the accuracy of his drawings, even after three months of steady work, more than a dozen drawings and six generous paychecks. As scientists, or at least graduate students in Botany, they must have quickly realized that his tectonic whorls and erupting, articulated stalks could not possibly be real. But there was only silence, and the bi-monthly check. Perhaps they hadn’t actually looked at his work yet. That had to be it. And when they did they would be furious and demand their money back.  But it was already gone. During his nights in the lab he’d decided to quit school and move away and spent the money on plane fare and a deposit on an apartment.  He had no connections there, and no job yet. It was a risky and impetuous move, and he was already regretting it. He’d lose his student deferment and be vulnerable to the draft. The university would be looking for him, and then the government.

The drawings became larger and more minute, covering smaller and smaller areas at greater enlargement, detailing more features that were not there. He passed in and out of spells, in a graphic trance. His eyes tired fast. He took frequent breaks. At first, he roamed the empty building, mostly dark and blank. Then he walked around the lab, peering into cloudy specimen jars of floating blobs. Then he stayed put on the metal stool, turning the seat slowly with a squeak. The lab was sour and dusty with formaldehyde, vinegar, mildewed paper, and mimeograph ink. There were bunsen burners and sinks. There was the knock and hiss of the radiator. There was a gurgling fish tank, empty save a plastic pirate skeleton and a treasure chest that popped opened to spew bubbles, then closed. And the clack of his rapidiograph pen, when he shook it, for ink flow. Beyond that was the snow blanketed silence, enclosing the lab like a muff.  

On his last night he turned off the microscope light and watched through the second-floor window as the snowflakes passed through the yellow street lamps. It was a childhood game: try to follow a single flake through the flurry on its race to the ground. Picture the path as a human life span. Try to imagine a mathematics that could measure how many flakes were actually passing through his visual field at any one moment. Then the calculations that could quantify the precise shape of this “visual field,” and project that out into larger measures of space and time. Then algorithms to model a hologrammatic map of human life spans from the beginning of the species, plotted as descending white dots from birth, at the top of the graph, to death, at the bottom. Then working to find correlations with the snowfall, and establishing how big a field, and how long and dense a snowfall would represent all the lives ever lived, up to this exact moment. Then making this into a three-dimensional display that could be synchronized with an actual area of outdoor falling snow. Then showing the animation in a darkened room in a gallery, or actually projecting the model onto matching snowflakes falling in a real outdoor space. He had no ability or training in mathematics and had no idea if such a thing were possible. This was the early 1970’s, and the technology for creating such a mathematically-plotted hologram room barely existed, if at all. And if it did, he would hardly know how to use it. It was what he wanted to see, and be, wanted it so bad that, sometimes, it was right there, for any fool to see.  

 

He peered through the amber yellow street lights to the black tree line across the quad. At the university there had just been riots against the war. Imagining himself a war correspondent artist he had climbed to the top of one tree above the tear gas and drawn the massed protestors confronting the National Guard. He drew his own face in the crowd, over and over. Now the quad was silent and empty and he wondered about his destiny, and his dad picking him up in ten minutes.  There was a hint of the tear gas in the sour air of the lab. Maybe tonight he would tell him on the drive home that he had decided to quit school and move away, even if it meant being drafted.

He blew on the drawing and decided it was all wrong, and all right.  He signed his name and the date and put it in the folder for finished work. He was no scientist, but he knew this was the moment in quantum physics popularizing the Many Worlds Theory: every moment, every choice split off into an infinite number of different possibilities, all of them existing as an infinite number of universes.

This was the night of forking paths. That’s how he would remember it.  He made the decision to leave school and move far away and start over. Everything that followed this decision was, indeed, different than what his prior trajectory seemed to predict. He’d given up trying to decide if it had been a mistake, or not. If the forking path he’d chosen was better or worse than his previous course. And what paths had the drawings of the spores opened? Or closed?

His father’s car drove up to the front steps and waited for him to appear. The snow fell through the headlights. The wipers stroked the flakes. He couldn’t see his father’s face through the windshield, but knew he was watching the snow, and smiling.